


Revolution of Interest

by Erinyes_kiss



Category: Person of Interest (TV), Revolution - Fandom
Genre: Crossovering, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-01
Updated: 2016-10-01
Packaged: 2018-08-18 21:02:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,475
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8176001
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Erinyes_kiss/pseuds/Erinyes_kiss
Summary: Charlie always knew that her parents had secrets. After her brother was killed, that was all they seemed to have. Now she knows at least one of them, and she's going to find out who Samaritan is and what it has to do with her family.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Lethally](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lethally/gifts).



 

Change should be collaborative. It should be discussed, compromised, arrived at after consultation and fair notice. Except in Charlie’s experience you were lucky if you had time to brace yourself for impact. Brothers died, mothers left, midnight flits were taken, and no one ever asked if you were OK with any of it.

If they had, she would have told them no. Not with any of it.

The detective was waiting at her dorm when she got home from work, her hands stinking of whiskey and glitter sweat-glued itchy in her cleavage. Mouth prissed with disapproval, the preacher-voiced man sat her down in the kitchen and told her that her Dad was dead. That he’d killed himself.

“I didn’t know,” she said. Her voice sounded small and lost, and she wasn’t sure why she’d said it. Maybe so they’d know that, if she’d known her Dad was lying dead on the floor of the garage, she’d not have been flashing cleavage and legs at drunks for tips. “Why…”

Detective Neville laced his hands together, dark calluses stretching over his knuckles, and gave her an empty, twist of a smile.

“He didn’t tell you about anything that was bothering him?”

She shrugged. “No. Ben never… We didn’t talk much,” she said. He was looking at her, and the need to justify it welled up in her throat. She wasn’t a bad child, a terrible daughter - or if she was, it wasn’t entirely her fault. That it wasn’t easy growing up with a dead brother’s ghost taking up most of the space, and that Ben had used silence like a weapon. She wanted to say all that, but she didn’t. Secrets weren’t something you gave away freely in her family. “I guess you’d say we were estranged.”

Detective Neville looked like her answer annoyed him. She didn’t know what he'd expected her to say. Maybe he’d just been hoping she’d cry. When all she could muster was dry eyes and silence, he gave her his card and let himself out.

She sat with it in her hands, looking at Neville’s name printed in sturdy block capitals in the middle of the glossy white card. It was a very nice card, for a policeman. The one she had pinned to the corkboard - the one the detective investigating her brother’s murder had given her - was cheap cardboard a step up from paper and the ink on it rubbed off on your hands.

Her hand closed around the card, sharp edges digging into her fingers as the card crumbled. Charlie hadn’t really meant to do it. She sat and stared at her clenched fist for a second, her knuckles aching and pressing white against her skin, and then - for lack of anything else to do - got up and chucked the bit of card out the window.

Then she made herself a cup of coffee and got her German textbooks out, because what else was she going to do? She still had a thesis to finish, and classes to go to tomorrow. The last her Dad would want, would expect, was her putting that at risk because he...

It was only when she couldn’t focus on the letters marching over the page that she really she was crying. She sniffed and wiped her hands over her face, her fingers coming away smeared with mascara. It didn’t help, grief squeezing out of her like she was a sponge.

He was her Dad. Despite everything - every paranoid move, every drunken rant, every empty cupboard - he was her Dad. The only family she’d had in the world, and now it was now all past tense.

Charlie folded her arms and put her head down, sobbing into them like her heart was broken. Sobbing so hard it hurt her chest.

Someone knocked the door, a tentative rat-a-tat-tat.

She sniffed and looked up, scrubbing her sleeve over her face. Her eyes felt raw and puffy, and there was salt in her nose.

“What?” she sniffled.

“Charlie?” The door opened and Mia stuck her head in, all corkscrew curls and abstract RA interest in her. When she saw Charlie’s cry-raw face she hesitated, her eyes going wide. “Oh. Are you OK? Did you get some bad news.”

Charlie sniffed and shook her head, giving her face another scrub on her sleeve. “It’s fine. It’s nothing. What do you want?”

It was obviously a lie. Mia hesitated for a second, considering whether or not she should call her out on it. Then she decided to take the easier option, and not bother.

“Some called for you,” she said. She jerked her thumb over her shoulder. “On the payphone.”

Mia left quickly, and Charlie blew her nose. She got up and headed out into the hall, wiping her wet hands on her jeans. The receiver on the phone was dangling, turning on the end of its cord. After a glance around to see if she was being pranked or not, Charlie went over and picked it.

“Hello?” she said.

“Good evening, admin,” a familiar, impossible voice said. “I am sorry for your loss.”

Charlie couldn’t breath, her heart twisting in a hard ball just below her breastbone. She staggered, bracing her hand against the cold metal frame of the phone to steady herself.

“Ben?” she said. Then for the first time in years, “Dad?”

“Shadow, Victor, Bravo; Time, November, Whiskey,” the voice said. It sounded ineffably calm, bland as milk and rice. Then there was a pause and when it spoke again it sounded...broken. “Charlie, Charlie, I’m sorry. There’s so much I should have told you. I didn’t. But now it’s up to you. You have to stop it. This isn’t what your mom wanted. It all went wrong. You have to save your uncle.”

“Dad?”

“Shadow, Victor, Bravo; Time, November, Whiskey,” the bland voice repeated. “Goodnight, Admin. It was good to meet you.”

 

Charlie sat on the tube, feet neatly together and hands clasped in her lap. The voice on the phone was now a voice in her head, a ghost of behavioural patterns and no emotional resonance. It was currently reciting the checkered military record of the drunk slouched opposite her. His legs stretched out into the aisle, untied laces trailing over the dirty floor, and he was sucking miserably at a bottle of something that was reaching across the train to make Charlie’s eyes sting. He hadn’t looked up once since he got on the train.

“I thought we were going to find answers,” Charlie sub-vocalised. Tried to sub-vocalise. From the nervous glance and shuffle sideways of the man sitting next to her, she was more muttering. She ducked her chin, hiding behind the loose swing of her pale hair. “Not some old drunk.”

_The likelihood of successfully acquiring answers with his help improves by 21.4%_

“Why?”

_I am sorry, Admin. You do not have access to that information at this time._

She clenched her jaw against the frustration of the immovable ‘at this time’ phrase. There was so much her Dad thought he should have told her, but apparently even from beyond the grave he had to be a control freak about it. She rubbed the back of her neck, fingertips finding the small ridge of scar tissue the injection had left.

“I don’t even know if you’re telling the truth.”

_I am not programmed to create falsehoods._

“That’s what a liar would say.”

The silence in her head was blandly offended. Charlie closed her eyes for a second and wondered if she actually wanted to go on with this. Injecting nanotechnology -- or a syringe full of crap -- into her neck was crazy, but at least it was privately crazy. This was extending her folie a père mort into the world of other people.

The train rocked to a stop at the next station and the doors creaked open. A dozen scuffling men staggered on, laughing and jabbing each other with their elbows. They were well-dressed, in designer jeans and branded t-shirts, but they smelled like a bar crawl of bad decisions.

“Hey, look at this,” one of them said, bleary eyes lighting on Charlie. “Looks like the party isn’t over! Hey, sweetheart, wanna make a couple of dollars?”

“No, thanks, I’m good.”

“Hard to fucking get,” the guy chortled. He staggered, nearly falling, as the train started again. Charlie cursed herself for not dropping this ridiculous idea and checking herself into hospital. She tucked her elbows in and pretended interest in her knees. The man sitting next to her suddenly found an interest in something at the far end of the carriage. The guy grabbed a handful of her hair, yanking it through his fingers. Charlie bit her lip and leaned away from him. “How about fifty bucks, sweetheart?”

There was a can of mace and a switchblade in her bag. Charlie debated going for them. The next station was a few minutes away, though, and a weapon would turn this into a fight. She was outnumbered and-

“...think she wants you to leave her alone,” a dry, unused growl of a voice said. Everyone looked. The drunk shambles had looked up. He had the palest, deadest eyes that Charlie had ever seen. “So why don’t you all fuck off.”

There was a pause, and maybe of the guy harrassing Charlie had been on his own that would have been enough. It was a witness, and despite the scruffy beard and greasy coat the man felt...dangerous…. Except there was a gang, and that always led to bad decisions.

“Who the hell asked you?” a skinny guy, his hair shaved into a painstakingly on-trend cut jeered. Then, with the glee of the lower rung primate, he swung around, “You gonna let him talk to you like that Lar?”

Lar looked frustrated for a second, then he puffed himself up and strutted over. He kicked the still-sprawled legs.

“Washed up old drunks should mind their own business,” he jeered. “Maybe we should teach you a lesson.”

He cocked his fist back.

“Don’t,” the drunk said.

He did, Charlie thought, give fair warning, it wasn’t his fault Lar didn’t listen. The drunk idiot threw a wide, wild punch, and the man caught his wrist in one hand. For a second it looked like he was going to have a reasonable chat, and then he wrenched Lar’s wrist to the side so hard it cracked like a stick and drove his heavy boot up into Lar’s balls.

The fight was vicious and short, all broken bones and heads smashed into hard surfaces. The cocky lower rung primate who’d pushed it got kicked in the chest so hard it cracked the keel of his breastbone. He lay where he’d fell, clutching himself and wheezing out self-pitying tears and snot.

It had taken under a minute. The drunk stood, feet braced against his swaying brain, and watched blood drip from his hands onto the floor.

He wasn’t paying any attention to Lar dragging himself painfully to his feet. The jerk lunged at his back, and Charlie stuck her leg out into his path. His legs tangled around her shin and he went down, hitting the rocking hard. Before he could pull himself back together, Charlie hopped up and kicked him in the face. His head snapped back, blood snotting out of his nose, and he flopped back dazed on the ground.

The train was pulling into the next stop. Charlie hesitated, but she supposed she’d already decided to invite someone into her delusions. She grabbed his hand, hard, rough skin hot under her palm, and yanked him towards the door.

“My name’s Charlie Matheson,” she said. “We need to go, Sergeant Monroe, and I need your help.”

He laughed with cracked lips. “I can’t even help myself,” he rasped “And I’m not a sergeant anymore.”

She yanked on his arm. “We need to go, the police will be here soon And we can’t trust them.”

He followed her. Later he’d say he didn’t know what he was doing, the amount of booze in his system, but he still followed her.

 

It had been a while since Bass had a shower. After a while, you stopped caring that much. It was just the background stink of your day. Seeing the filth slough off him, though, dredged up the ghost of disgust from down where he’d buried the rest of those socially appropriate things.

Dirty water skirled around his feet and down the chipped, industrial metal drain. After the third scrub, there was more suds than filth. He stayed under the water for a while longer. If it had been a long time since he’d been clean, it had been even longer since he’d been _warm_.

He braced his arms against the cracked tiles and bent his head, letting the water beat down on his shoulders and back. It was hot enough to scorch his skin pink, old white scars standing out seams on his stomach and thighs.

Old fucking soldier, what point was there in one of them?

He grimaced, spitting out water, and finally dragged himself out of the shower. There were fresh clothes on the toilet, neatly folded, and razors, scissors, and shaving foam on the sink. The shower had apparently woken up enough of who he’d used to be, that he felt a mixture of annoyance and shame about that pointed hint.

Not that he had to do what she said. He’d left the Marines a long time ago, and he’d lost his taste for leggy, big-eyed blondes…somewhere around the time a bottle of whiskey had started appealing more.

Still. He was here. And she was a Matheson. He’d always hated to disappoint one of them.

He picked up the scissors and took them to his beard, sawing off chunks of dirt-brown hair. The sink filled as he cropped his way across the top of the skull, leaving unruly tufts sticking up where they’d escaped the harvest. He scrubbed soap over his face and picked up a razor. His hands were steady. It didn’t matter how much he drunk, or needed to drunk, his hands were always steady.

When he was done, he stared at himself in the mirror.

Shaved, clean. He looked like the cocky Marine who’d been sent off to Afghanistan. Except old. Jesus. He rubbed his hand over his face, finding the new lines, and wondered when the hell that had happened. Old habits made him want to turn and ask Miles.

He got dressed instead. Worn jeans and a t-shirt with the University of Chicago logo on it. Ben’s clothes, he supposed, rubbing his fingers over the cotton. It could even be one of the t-shirts he’d seen Ben wearing when they’d visited him on shore leave, pretending that the Matheson’s were really his family.

What the hell was Ben doing letting his kid run around picking up drunks on trains? If this was another intervention….

He waited for the familiar resentment, the self-destructive spite that sent him crawling into a bottle or a whore or anything that’d take his money and fuck him up.

All he got was weary emptiness. Even the anger was gone.

He scrubbed his hand through his hair, plastering the wet rat-tails down before they could curl, and padded out in bare feet to see what the Mathesons wanted this time. Maybe he was finally ready to listen.

 

The lab looked like it had been a while since it was in use. There was a layer of dust everywhere and the air smelled...still, as if nothing much had come through here lately. There was a calendar on the wall, that hadn’t had a page turned since March last year.

Lying on a couch that was too short for her, the latest Matheson to interfere in him killing himself was catching a nap. Or, from the tight set of her face, arguing with the insides of her own eyelids.

“Where’s Ben?” he asked.

She started up from the couch like she’d forgotten he was there, one hand shoving her hair back from her face. Charlie. He remembered her from pictures in Miles’s wallet, dog-eared from evenings when Miles got drunk enough to forget he definitely had no doubts about whose kid she was.

Rachel’s was the obvious answer. She had the hair, and the eyes. Except it was Ben in the set of her mouth and the uncertainty around her eyes. Nothing of Miles.

“Monroe,” she said. “You were friends with Uncle Miles.”

He grunted. It had been too many years for that reminder to hurt. He’d grow calluses like scar tissue over that old wound.

“Where’s Ben.”

She blinked. “Dead,” she said. Her chin lifted. “And Miles? Where’s he?”

Monroe looked away from her. The ghosts that lived in her face were disturbing. His eyes skimmed over machinery and empty spaces, and the back of his neck was crawling like he was in danger.

“I ain’t got no reason to answer your questions,” he said. “Me and Miles, we been on the outs for a long time.”

“Is there any reason not to answer my questions?” she asked.

Monroe licked his lips and tasting soap. “Yeah,” he said. “Plenty of those. You got anything to drink?”

“Coffee?”

“I was thinking something stronger.”

She snorted. “Then come to the bar when I’m working,” she said. Out of the corner he saw her stand up, habit snapping his attention back to her. Blonde, curvy, and too young for him -- way too young. Once upon a time he’d been all over that. Now he just felt...empty. “I’ve got coffee, or some green tea if you want.”

He took coffee, leaning back against the wall and savouring the dark roast hit of it in his stomach. It did the opposite of what he wanted, perking up worn down, drink-damaged brain cells.  Old hurts. Old shames. Old debts.

“I don’t know you, kid,” he said. “I don’t owe you anything.”

“You knew my mother,” Charlie said.

His mouth twitched. “Never liked her much.”

Charlie gave a wide, empty smile that didn’t touch those pretty eyes. “Me neither. I don’t think anyone did. She’s going to end the world.”

Monroe took a swig of coffee. It was bitter, but fuck if it was as bitter as him. “Tell me something new.”

 

It was a room very similar to the one Bass would find himself standing in fifteen years later, only everything was brand new and stank of bleach. Rachel stood in the middle of the room, wearing a white coat and clutching a clipboard as if they were the props holding her together.

Underneath it she was just emptiness and grief that no one would let lie down in the grave where they wanted to be. Bass had been there. Was there till sometimes, on the nights when him and the gun drank alone.

Today he was sober, and he didn’t want to get fired. Behind Flynn’s back he glared at Miles. His best friend pretended not to notice, watching Rachel like a dog desperate to be acknowledged. Unresolved sexual tension was just another of those things that had withered under Rachel’s grief.

“The Samaritan project will be worldwide security protocol,” she said. “Infallible. Indefatigable. Incorruptible.”

“And inadmissible,” Flynn said. “I sympathise with your loss, Dr Matheson -- more than I can say -- but the Samaritan project is not of interest to the-”

“You’re wrong,” Rachel said. She tucked her hair behind her ear and lifted her chin. Her eyes were so dull and red rimmed they barely looked blue anymore, and there was something missing in there. “Samaritan is of interest to everyone.”

There was a pause. Flynn wasn’t inclined to change his mind once he’d made it, but there was something convincing about Rachel.

“All right,” he said. “Show me.”

It had probably been a while since Rachel had smiled. Maybe she’d lost the knack, but what curved her lips had nothing pleasant in it.

 

Two glasses and a bottle of whiskey that already been cracked open.

Bass snorted at the peace offering and stripped his jacket off, tugging his tie loose. “Started without me,” he said, pitching his voice to carry. The toilet flushed and water ran in the bathroom, Miles stepping out a second later.

“Keeping it warm for you,” Miles shrugged. He ran his hand through his hair and grimaced. “Look, Rachel needs this.”

Bass shook his head and grabbed the bottle, splashing a measure into the cloudy glass. He tossed it back, blinking as the heat of it hit the back of his throat.

“She ain’t your wife, Miles,” he pointed out. “Just saying.”

“Ben’s useless. He’s too caught up in his own grief to see that Rachel needs...something.”

“Don’t think your dick will fix this,” Bass said. “What the hell does she need a sex offender for, Miles?”

His best friend looked down, avoiding his eyes, and spun the glass in its mark on the table. That’s when Bass knew it was going to be bad. If Miles couldn’t front up to it, it was going to be ugly. It was too late to do anything about it now, so he drank instead.

By midnight, he was drunk enough to think, ‘How bad could it be?”

When he found out the answer, he wished he’d left Miles in the bottle and gone and killed Rachel. It wasn’t because of the child molester who keeled over as he got out of the bus and glanced towards the playground. He’d have killed the man himself, not lost any sleep over it.

It was the look of delight on Flynn’s face and the emptiness on Rachel’s as she stared at the dead man. And the information scrolling down the tablets they’d been given for the demonstrations.

Ismay would have been innocent -- as innocent as filth like that could manage -- for another two years. Two years of glancing at the playground every day before he decided to touch a child. It didn’t matter to Samaritan.

A real good Samaritan in Rachel’s bitter new world didn’t stop to help in the aftermath, they stopped the tragedy from ever happening. And nobody but her and Flynn would ever know.

And Ben, he supposed.

 

Would it have been better, or worse, if it had been the man who killed Danny, Charlie wondered. It was a bleak thought, and she didn’t have an answer. Just a dead brother, and a mother who was executing people for crimes they’d not committed yet.

She sat opposite the man who could have stopped it, studying his closed, elegant face. The coffee cup warmed her hands, giving her something to do.

Without the matted beard and the filthy clothes, Monroe was a good looking man and somehow more discomfiting. Obviously dangerous. Her uncle’s best friend, but she didn’t remember him from when she was a kid. Of course, she didn’t remember her uncle much either. He’d visited once -- she thought -- a careless, laughing man in a pretty red car. They’d sung along to something on the radio, and she’d been sick on the leather seats.

That was it.

“Is that why you and Miles parted ways?” she asked.

“Part of it.” Monroe tossed the coffee back like it was liquor. “Me and Miles, we were good at killing and not much else. Not much of us to like.”

“What happened to him?”

He canted a grin at her, his eyes nasty over a surprisingly lovely smile. “I’d have thought you’d ask about your mother. How long _has_ it been since you saw her, Charlie?”

If he wanted to get under her skin, he was on the wrong track. She’d been the motherless new girl at a dozen schools growing up. The motherless new girl with a drunk dad at, at least, five. Teenagers were a lot better at being vicious than Sebastian Monroe.

“Probably?” she said. “Not since that night. Besides, she’s not the one the Machine wants.”

He squinted at her. “The Machine?”

The capital letter was easy to hear somehow. It just slotted into the tongue.

Charlie rubbed the back of her neck, picking at the thread of scar with her nails. “That’s...complicated.”

Monroe shrugged broad shoulders. “So’s my past, and my relationship with your uncle.”

Charlie wanted to tell him to go fuck himself, but the Machine said they needed him. If it was wrong...well, she’d injected it into her spinal column. She’d pretty much bet the bank that it knew what it was doing.

“Rachel didn’t come up with Samaritan on her own. She perfected it, but she didn’t create it. Ben and a couple of other scientists did that, and it was never meant to be a weapon.”

“And you work for them.”

Charlie set the coffee cup down and stretched her hands out, pressing them flat against the table. “They’re dead. Or so missing that they might as well be,” she said. “Suicide mostly.”

“Is that-”

Monroe hesitated over the question, grimacing as if common decency had caught up with him.

“Ben killed himself. I don’t know why,” Charlie said. “He didn’t leave a note, just the project they’d been working on. The antidote to Samaritan.”

He shook his head sceptically. “I’ve seen Rachel’s Samaritan is action, Charlie. It’s too late to stop it; the world belongs to Rachel and Flynn now. We’re just waiting until they get around to killing us. If this Machine could stop that, why hasn’t it already?”

“I don’t know. It didn’t come with an instruction manual,” Charlie said. She caught herself rubbing her neck again and stopped. “But it’s a chance, that’s more than we have otherwise.”

Monroe leaned back and rubbed his face. “What do you need me for?”

“To save Uncle Miles,” Charlie said. She shrugged when Monroe dropped his hands and stared at her. “That’s what the Machine wants. To start with.”

“Why? What good is Miles to this thing?”

Since the Machine had called her, Charlie had dropped out of university, injected nanotech, recruited drunken homeless men on the underground. It was safe to say that she’d not been talking her decisions over with people. Not that she had anyone who’d listen even if she’d wanted to. That didn’t mean she’d not been thinking.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I think….I think it wants to learn from him.”

“Learn what?”

“How to kill.”

Monroe's mouth twisted. “Yeah,” he said. “I mean, I'm good, but Miles was a fucking genius at murder.”

It wasn’t entirely what Charlie wanted to hear about her uncle, but it wasn’t a surprise either.

“Will you help?” she asked.

Monroe looked down into the dregs of his cup, his mouth twisting over his teeth.

“There’s one problem with that, Charlotte,” he said. “Miles doesn’t want to be saved. Miles _is_ Samaritan.”


End file.
